Strike was a film that, as I mentioned in class, meant something very different to me upon this second viewing. Although on this second viewing I was much more engaged and understood the pacing of the film better, the same images stuck out to me both times. While, upon this viewing, I appreciated much more thoroughly the cinematography and the general representation of proletariat experience, I felt most intrigued by Eisenstein’s message of purity versus corruption. I feel that Eisenstein illustrated this through two sets of figures: the cherubic child juxtaposed against his father and his murderer, and the baby animals against the slaughtering of the cats and bull.
While these images were not ever pitted against each other in the edit in literal montage, I do think that there’s still some element of “intellectual montage” used here. In his essay, Eisenstein fleshes out (or attempts to? I find this essay somewhat incomprehensible, but maybe that’s just me) how all art is derived from conflict, and how a viewer interprets meaning from conflicting concepts. Eisenstein’s note that this can be present in edit, cinematography or stage design, or even in character psychology points to this further. Both times I watched Strike the appearance of frolicking animals was a welcome reprise in such a dark industrial film, and their soft, carefree image made the appearance of dead cats and a slaughtered bull that much more horrifying. Similarly, the arc of the blonde child’s relationship with his striking father and the abuse he faced as the strike dragged on shows, to me, two things: first being the innocence that is lost upon being exploited by the bourgeois, and the second being the stark contrast between the purity and acceptance of the young proletariat, and the disgusting corruption of the businessmen.
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